Who will win the 2025 F1 world title? Our writers have their say

Max Verstappen’s recent charge has thrown the 2025 Formula 1 world championship fight wide open.

The defending world champion’s United States Grand Prix domination, winning both the sprint and main race, has cut the deficit to Oscar Piastri to 40 points.

Meanwhile, Lando Norris has also been eating into the gap to the championship leader with just 14 points between the McLaren team-mates.

With five rounds to go, which includes sprint races in Brazil and Qatar, our writers have their say on who will win the drivers’ world title.

Norris: He is doing all the right things – Oleg Karpov

Lando Norris has had his fair share of criticism for dropping points this year and not maximising chances to capitalise on rivals’ mistakes. Canada springs to mind, where a misjudgement led to a DNF after contact with Oscar Piastri, as well as China sprint qualifying, where an error on his final attempt proved costly.

Lately, though, Norris has probably been as strong as we’ve seen. He didn’t make big gains on Piastri in Baku – but you could argue he was wise not to take unnecessary risks, too. Any over-optimistic move in pursuit of a bigger swing on his team-mate could’ve meant another DNF; staying on the safe side was likely the right call.

Since retiring from the Dutch GP, he’s clearly been the stronger McLaren driver – outscoring the team-mate who only weeks ago looked like his only title rival. After a disappointing Singapore qualifying, he made the most of raceday and took the only realistic opening to pass Piastri on lap one – a move that should’ve been applauded, not met with talk of ‘repercussions’. That’s exactly what you want from a title contender, and it’s absurd he now seems to be carrying a penalty for it.

Same story in Austin. McLaren was arguably too cautious on strategy, starting on mediums rather than softs, yet Norris delivered close to the maximum from that position. Some say he could’ve attacked Charles Leclerc harder early on, but his risk management in that fight looked just about right. Racing someone with less to lose is tricky – Norris handled it well and made it stick when the chance came.

Perhaps this is what he should’ve done all year – leave a touch more margin, including in China and Canada.

He’s now 14 points behind Piastri in the standings, and with five rounds left the playbook is simple: keep doing the same. Verstappen is right there in the mirrors, but he still needs a near-perfect run to the flag – and there are tracks to come where McLaren should be stronger.

Ironically, that Zandvoort DNF may have helped Norris reset – while Piastri, handed a big points cushion, has looked less composed. Both remain serious contenders, but the recent evidence suggests Norris knows exactly what he’s doing.

Verstappen: Piastri and Norris have more to prove than the Dutch driver – Filip Cleeren

Lando Norris, McLaren, Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing

Photo by: Clive Mason / Getty Images

I’m not a huge believer in momentum. It’s one of those concepts that tricks you into exaggerating. Over the summer, Red Bull was dead and buried. Now that Verstappen has been the dominant driver over the last four races, it’s his title to lose. The differences in F1 have been so minuscule that nuance is important, and the world can look very different again come Sunday night.

Having said that, there are more reasons to put Verstappen forward as the favourite than either McLaren driver, despite the – albeit dwindling – points deficit.

If all else is equal, the biggest factor for me is experience. Verstappen has been there before – four times no less – including going all the way down to the wire in 2021. It’s easy to forget, but that memorable title battle with Lewis Hamilton was already Verstappen’s seventh season in F1.

Norris should also have enough experience by now, although he isn’t able to bask in the reassurance of already having been a world champion before. But we’re also quick to gloss over the fact that points leader Piastri in still only in his third season.

So, advantage Verstappen if, as I said, all else is equal. But it’s not. He and Red Bull have shown they can now win on most circuits, and if you look at the five remaining venues I would only really put McLaren down as the favourite for the medium-speed twists and turns of Qatar.

Las Vegas is not going to be McLaren’s happy hunting ground, although Verstappen might also get beaten there again by Mercedes’ George Russell. Mexico doesn’t have many corners the McLaren excels at either, while Brazil and Abu Dhabi are too close to call right now. I can see Verstappen win at least three races while Norris and Piastri will keep taking points off each other.

I still think Piastri can do it if he can find answers to his Austin woes, and Norris has been performing strongly over the past two races. But neither can afford any more slip-ups and as the heat is turned up, they’ll have to prove to the world they can pull that off. Verstappen already has, plenty of times.

Piastri: The power is still in the Australian’s hands – Owen Bellwood

Oscar Piastri, McLaren

Photo by: Zak Mauger / LAT Images via Getty Images

There’s no denying that Max Verstappen and Red Bull have had a mightily impressive run of late. Three wins from four races and the momentum that form like this brings is not to be sniffed at – and is very much the sign of a true champion given his start to the season. But I still don’t think it’s quite enough to overcome McLaren just yet.

Sure, the papaya team has floundered in recent weeks, with its drivers clashing and results not matching the impressive form it showed earlier in the season. However, the chance of both Verstappen’s results and Mclaren’s struggles continuing consistently seems like a long shot.

McLaren’s Oscar Piastri still leads the standings and has a buffer of 14 points to his team-mate Lando Norris, and Verstappen is a further 26 points back from Norris. When it’s written down,

that doesn’t sound like a big gap to overcome – especially considering that the Dutchman has already slashed that lead from triple figures just a handful of races ago.

But McLaren know this, and know that the title is its to lose should it royally mess this one up. If the team can find its strong footing once again and Piastri can regain his cool, calm and formidable demeanour, then doing the double and claiming the constructors’ and drivers’ crowns this year shouldn’t be too big an ask. All the team has to do is get on top of the tension that is rising between Piastri and Norris, stop the pair from taking points off one another, and stamp out any silly mistakes that open the door to Verstappen.

No biggie, then.

Verstappen: Max will win it, unless McLaren enacts a final flourish – Jake Boxall-Legge

Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing

Photo by: Andrew Ferraro / LAT Images via Getty Images

Mexico, Sao Paulo, Las Vegas, Qatar, Abu Dhabi. Just five locales left for Formula 1’s circus to pitch up in before we can finally get some rest and hibernate until the end of January.

I’m not just wishing the year away: each of those five venues offer very different circuits with very different characteristics. There’s the high-speed, high-altitude Mexico City venue to kick us off next weekend, followed by the more compact and rain-prone Sao Paulo to follow. Las Vegas, again, is a very different prospect, with its cold weather and low-grip surface, followed by the plethora of medium-speed corners at Qatar and the stop-start DRS-fest at Abu Dhabi.

Before the US GP, one might have suspected Verstappen would take some points out of the McLarens in Mexico and Brazil, followed by a Mercedes cold-track special in Vegas, then ending with McLaren’s final flourish in F1’s final Middle Eastern leg. But here’s the most salient point: Verstappen can very realistically win at all of them.

The Dutchman’s performance at the Circuit of the Americas demonstrated that McLaren’s previous potency in the medium-speed is no longer as advantageous as it had been through the majority of the season. Red Bull, meanwhile, has polished its diamond-in-the-rough and coerced its RB21 into delivering consistent results.

As such, the question that F1’s folk and followers should be asking is not “can Verstappen win the title?” – it’s “how can McLaren stop him from winning it?”.

It’s over to you, McLaren.

Verstappen: Red Bull has momentum while McLaren sits on its hands – Stuart Codling

Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing, Oscar Piastri, McLaren, Lando Norris, McLaren

Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool

It’s always unwise to extrapolate from a limited sample set, but we can perhaps make an exception given recent developments.

McLaren has had a car advantage for most, if not all, of the circuits visited this year, which has enabled it to enforce its policy of letting its drivers race. Or, rather, given the impression that it can. What’s happened is that points have been left on the table and now the team is facing the consequences.

That much is hindsight. McLaren can still rescue the situation but the most logical course of action now is to at least consider throwing its weight behind one driver. Saying that it will wait and let mathematics decide is simply not proactive enough, given the increasing threat.

Depending on your optics it would be easy to downplay the threat posed by Red Bull and Max Verstappen, but that would be to write off his recent turn of form as a random statistical cluster. Whereas it is becoming clear that the most recent new floor upgrade, from Monza onwards, has enabled Red Bull to run the RB21 at more beneficial ride heights while mitigating the amount of rear plank wear. This isn’t a statistical cluster, it’s a game changer.

As evinced by all but one race this year – the costly moment of madness in Spain – Verstappen will always find a way to extract the maximum available performance from his car. After the sprint race in Austin, if he won every remaining race of the season and Oscar Piastri finished second in all of them, Piastri would still win the world championship.

The mathematics are now evolving differently, not least because Piastri has now had two consecutive weekends in which he has been underwhelming by his own standards. In a typical weekend he starts off slower than Lando Norris but builds to a peak at the right time, in Q3, then carries that through on race day. In Austin he looked nowhere near that trajectory.

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella comes from an engineering background, so it’s understandable that his outlook should be to believe that every performance factor can be predicted and managed to some degree. But motorsport, while technical, is also organic in the way races evolve along unpredictable lines.

There are difficult choices ahead for McLaren which can’t be resolved by recourse to graphs and spreadsheets. It’s a question of which driver the team believes in most. Pick one, and back him, or Verstappen will serve up a plate of madeleines de Prost (1986).

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– The Autosport.com Team